Free Republic

Leftists who opposed Obamacare because it was not the British-style National Health Service or the Canadian "single payer" system should take another look. Constitutional conservatives who feared that Obamacare was a blueprint for an incremental roll out of "single payer" have been proven right. California's governor is about to sign legislation to set up that state's Health Benefits Exchange. The HBE is authorized under Obamacare and is supposed to be a place where small business and individuals can access the best insurance plans at the cheapest price—a real exchange where customers can compare benefits and price in a competitive atmosphere....

AS I SEE IT Congress must repeal Obama's health-care rationing plan By SEN. PAT ROBERTS Special to The Star SNIPPET: "U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Dodge City, Kan., is a member of the Senate Health and Finance committees. He voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." SNIPPET: "It has scarcely been three months since the new health reforms, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), were signed into law. Unfortunately, as I and many of my colleagues predicted, the promises made to the American people by the president and the majority are already unraveling. The...

Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers. The documents — product of a joint project of the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the IRS — examine the effects new regulations would have on existing, or “grandfathered,” employer-based health care plans. Draft copies of the documents were reportedly leaked to House Republicans earlier in the week. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted them on his Web site Friday afternoon. (View the full report here.)...

As weeks turned to months during the Great Debate over what to do about health care this past year, President Obama made one solemn pledge to the nation and its seniors: He said health care would not add one dime to the deficit. And if all of us liked our doctor, we would get to keep our doctor. Fast-forward almost 90 days after the passage of ObamaCare and the attitude of most Americans to that pledge is: "Prove it." In the past two weeks, the Obama administration has been trying to stem the tide of skepticism toward its health care...

Note: The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/seniors-across-america-host-local-meetings-participate-health-care-tele-town-hall-m Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release June 07, 2010 Seniors Across America to Host Local Meetings, Participate in Health Care Tele-Town Hall Meeting with President Obama Senior Obama Administration Officials to Attend Local Meetings WASHINGTON—On Tuesday morning, senior citizens across the country will gather at a series of local meetings to participate via phone in a national tele-town hall meeting on the Affordable Care Act with President Barack Obama. Additionally, more than a dozen senior Obama Administration officials will...

(CNSNews.com) - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Wednesday that Dr. Donald Berwick, an advocate of health-care rationing nominated by President Barack Obama to run Medicare and Medicaid, is “absolutely the right leader at this time” to run the government’s largest health-care entitlement programs. Under the health-care reform law signed by President Obama in March, hundreds of billions of dollars will be cut from the Medicare program over the next decade. Berwick is nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees Medicare. Berwick, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has repeatedly indicated...

Greece is the word when it comes to upside-down economies, but America is hardly giving the world a better fiscal example. U.S. government debt continues to spiral out of control, thanks in large part to Obamacare. Long after the votes to approve the government takeover of health care, bureaucratic number-crunchers are finally doing the math to figure out how much it will cost. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concluded in April that Democrats double-counted projected Medicare spending cuts as savings and for helping ease existing financial strains on the Medicare system. It can't do both. Correcting this accounting...

Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...

When President Obama signed his health-care reform last month, he declared it will "lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government." So why are Democrats scrambling to pass a new bill that would impose price controls on insurance? In now-they-tell-us hearings on Tuesday, the Senate health committee debated a bill that would give states the power to reject premium increases that state regulators determine are "unreasonable." Some 27 states currently have some form of rate review , but generally don't leverage it because insolvent insurers are expensive for states and bankruptcies limit consumer choices. One exception...

Obama: Is He Helping Or Hurting Your Business? Timothy Shea has been providing IT solutions for 21 years and has never worked as hard or felt as much economic pressure. Shea, CEO and senior consultant at Alpha NetSolutions, a solution provider based in Marlborough, Mass., says his income as the owner of an "S" corporation that files a personal tax return has dropped 25 percent from 2007 to 2009. At the same time, the health-care costs for his eight-employee, $1.2 million business have doubled over the past three years. Shea is one of many small-business solution providers interviewed for this...

"Health Law Bans New Doctor-Owned Hospitals, Blocks Expansion of Existing Ones" SNIPPET: "The rules fall under Title VI, Section 6001 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The provision is titled “Physician Ownership and Other Transparency – Limitations on Medicare Exceptions to the Prohibition on Certain Physician Referral for Hospitals.” More than 60 doctor-owned hospitals across the country that were in the development stage will be canceled, said Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America (PHA). “That’s a lot of access to communities that will be denied,” Sandvig told CNSNews.com. “The existing hospitals are greatly affected. They...

"Congress Votes to Socialize Health Care in United States" Monday, March 22, 2010 By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief SNIPPET: "According to the CBO, by 2016, the cheapest family health care plan that Americans will be required to buy under the law will cost $12,000 per year. The average family plan will cost $15,200. A family of four making $88,201 per year—or more than 400 percent of the poverty level—will not receive any federal subsidy to purchase such a plan. They will pay taxes, however, to subsidize the health care purchases of people earning less than 400 percent of poverty. According...

Now that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she may use the so-called self-executing rule to push through Obamacare, it's time to borrow a line from Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" and ask: Really? You're going to pass legislation that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control without an actual House vote? Really? You think House Democrats will be able to claim that they didn't vote for the healthcare bill by voting instead for a package of changes, and then "deeming" the Senate bill passed? Really? You believe voters are dumb enough to be fooled by this? You do?...

On Fox News Sunday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs predicted the Democratic health-care reform plan will be passed and signed into law by next weekend. "We'll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week," Gibbs said, and by next Sunday claimed we "will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but, I think, as the law of the land." Gibbs also said that Democrats look forward to campaigning on the passage of the health-care bill in the 2010 midterm elections. "[O]nce it passes, we're happy to have the 2010 elections be about...

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After seven and a half hours of the Republicans trying to introduce some rationality into the discussion of Obamacare, the "reform" of Medicare that actually takes trillions out of the present system and adds millions of people into it, the ordinary American can be excused for being confused, frustrated, and angry. That's exactly where President Obama, the Chicago political mafia around him, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want people to be. At one point in the pointless all-day meeting on Thursday, she even claimed that passing Obamacare would create four million jobs overnight! Even...

Insurance: Spiking premiums are telling us something important — about why costs are out of control and why ObamaCare won't work. It's time to listen to these price signals, not try to squelch them. True to form, Democrats were quick to jump on the recent flap in California over the request by Wellpoint Inc.'s Anthem-Blue Cross unit for a 39% increase in premiums for its individual health plans. Forget about the complexities of health economics. This was meant to be a populist morality play. The administration and its allies jumped on the story with a blast at insurance company greed...

Health Reform: The linchpin of ObamaCare 2.0 is that 31 million uninsured will be covered at little added cost. But in fact, White House estimates for low costs are based on little more than accounting tricks. The president's plan "puts our budget and economy on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years — and about $1 trillion over the second decade — by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse," the White House says on its Web site. Sound too good to be true? It is. None of...

Three days before President Obama's supposedly bipartisan health-care summit, the White House released a new blueprint that Democrats say they will ram through Congress with or without Republican support. So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters want they don't want anyway. Ah, the glory of "progressive" governance and democratic consent. "The President's Proposal," as the White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into...

Every single day of this man's presidency is focused on destroying individual liberty and capitalism. There is no absolutely no authority for the federal government to control insurance premiums. This is right out of the Politburo's handbook. President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation?s health care system, White House officials said. Keep in mind that this is effectively seizing control of the health insurance industry. After all, if you control the rates, you control the companies'...